Social Impact Tech: Dana Kim and Ethan Kellough of Highlight On How Their Technology Will Make An Important Positive Impact
An Interview With Jilea Hemmings
Be kind to the planet. In general our business model requires us to ship and send products to people’s homes. As much as possible, we’ve tried to limit our ecological impact in doing so. We bundle products together in one box as opposed to sending multiple boxes, we use recycled materials, and we use compostable materials instead of plastics when we do our packaging. We also, for example, have given pro bono insights to sustainable brands and brands that are planet focused. We know it is so important that those brands succeed for everyone’s future.
In recent years, Big Tech has gotten a bad rep. But of course many tech companies are doing important work making monumental positive changes to society, health, and the environment. To highlight these, we started a new interview series about “Technology Making An Important Positive Social Impact”. We are interviewing leaders of tech companies who are creating or have created a tech product that is helping to make a positive change in people’s lives or the environment. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Highlight.
Meet Dana Kim and Ethan Kellough. Dana is CEO and co-founder of Highlight. For years, Dana worked as a market researcher, collecting important consumer insights to inform product innovation, development, and marketing at big CPG. Ethan is the Chief Product Technology Officer and other co-founder at Highlight. He spent years in product development and design, leveraging consumer empathy and research to build better products. Although they came from different backgrounds, they joined forces on a few common visions- to reduce waste in the product development process and make market research more inclusive of all.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory and how you grew up?
Dana: I was born in New York as a first generation American — my parents immigrated here from Seoul. My dad is a stay at home dad — when they first arrived in the US, he worked odd jobs to support my mom’s dream of becoming a doctor and going to medical school. My mom is a pediatrician. I’m the middle of 3 girls, and me and my sisters grew up in this home watching my hardworking, ambitious mom build and grow her career, and my parents together realize the American dream. It inspired diligence and dreaming big into who I am today.
Ethan: I come from a family of entrepreneurs. My whole family at some point or another has started their own business. Growing up in that environment I watched the highs and lows of people trying to make their dream work, and was inspired by the grit and determination of everyone around me. That also meant I grew up very independent with a lot of time to explore my interests, which led to me exploring with curiosity many different fields and disciplines, a skill I have brought forward into my adult life and career as well!
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
Dana + Ethan: … Global pandemic? Our first iteration of Highlight (at that point, we were Showcase) was launched in January 2020 — a network of market research vending machines where you could get free products in exchange for feedback. 6 weeks post launch, pandemic hit. We’’ll never forget, in the height of COVID-19, mask and gloves on, going to the vending machine, emptying it of its inventory, and unplugging it, for who knew how long. That was a moment of ‘wow, this is really happening’ and realizing that we needed to adapt or fold. We chose to adapt.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
Dana: My older sister, Jean. As a sibling 4 years my elder, she did everything first. Playing sports in middle school, applying to college, living in NYC, going to graduate school… From as far back as I remember, I looked to her to understand what was right, and what was possible. She made her dreams of becoming an oral surgeon come true, one minute, day, year at a time. She paved her own way and figured out what life, school, and career meant in America. She hadn’t necessarily been the one to help me study for exams, draft my resume, or mock interview for jobs, but her relentless determination in achieving her goals, no matter how seemingly difficult, instilled that same sense of optimism and ambition in me.
Ethan: My grandfather has always been my biggest cheerleader. He has been a huge role model in my life with his generosity, humility, and humor.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
Dana: I don’t know that it’s a life lesson quote, but I love the phrase ‘Know your strengths.’ Firstly, because it means having confidence in what you’re doing despite all the highs and lows and rollercoasters of entrepreneurship. But secondly (and I think more importantly), it means knowing your weaknesses. In business and in life, it’s so important to surround yourself with the right people, tools, situations, to set yourself up for success.
Ethan: My life lesson quote would be “shit happens”. You can plan all you want and try and prepare for many things that come your way but the unexpected will still happen. It’s important to be able to roll with these occurrences, pivot or make the best of situations.
You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
Dana: Vision, diligence, and confidence. Vision to see beyond tomorrow, or next week, or next month, and even next year, and dream up a better product, or better future. Diligence to execute and make sure that vision becomes reality. Confidence to bulldoze past roadblocks and build momentum within your business and team.
Ethan: I would say curiosity, empathy, and never shying away from a challenge. I try to look at challenges and see opportunities. Looking at it and saying “Wow, this challenge presents an opportunity for personal growth or self learning.” Every problem is just inviting a solution, and incorporating that mindset of having problems and looking at them as opportunities is invaluable.
Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about the tech tools that you are helping to create that can make a positive social impact on our society. To begin, what problems are you aiming to solve?
Dana: 30,000 new products are launched every year, and 90% of them fail. How can we change that? Highlight was built based on this idea — on the brand side, there’s so much time, money, effort, and resources that can go to waste when innovation isn’t done right. On the consumer side, there’s no greater frustration than purchasing an item expecting one thing, and opening it only to be disappointed. By building a community and platform united in the mission to build better products, we’re combatting that statistic and helping products succeed.
Ethan: From my background, as a product designer and developer, the process of building a product is challenging, there’s always room for improvement. The societal impact is in the human capital and resource waste that goes into designing products that are destined to fail, in essence, people don’t like them or they don’t have good success. The impact we want to have is in eliminating that waste in the product innovation process. From the very beginning of developing a product, you want to figure out it’s likelihood of succeeding so that these resources aren’t wasted and can be redeployed somewhere else in society. Basically, how can Highlight help design the perfect product for a certain person so that they enjoy it and it’s not wasted.
How do you think your technology can address this?
Dana + Ethan: Highlight is an agile in-home product insights platform, with a focus on CPG innovation. It’s the first of its kind. We send curated discovery boxes to our engaged community, in exchange for feedback via our research-optimized app. Our platform boasts 90% survey completion rates, can get product in hands in days, and seamlessly collects qualitative and quantitative feedback at scale. By democratizing access to data for both emerging and enterprise brands, we’re helping inject data into innovation processes and ensure that brand teams have all the information they need to build products that win. The biggest thing is getting feedback on products as early and as often as possible, and connecting brands and product developers to the consumers that they need opinions from. The technology we’ve built is there to eliminate the waste by forging those connections and getting that data as early, as seamlessly, and as often as possible.
Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about this cause?
Dana: After working agency-side as a qualitative researcher for 5 years, and running global insights projects with several big CPGs, I realized the increasing importance of product insights, but also how difficult it was to conduct physical product testing at scale. We leveraged the growing presence of online tools to make qual more efficient and scalable, but introducing physical products to test made research projects incredibly slow and laborious. I’ll never forget — my first fieldwork was for Dr. Pepper, and I stood in Family Dollars in central Florida for days with a colleague, with paper surveys and $5 gift cards in my hand. At the end of the week we had spent hours of our time and gotten ~35 responses to our questionnaire. I knew there had to be a better way. 5 years later, after continuing to feel this growing pain point, I set out to build a solution to the space.
Ethan: This is always a story that Dana and I love to tell because we have exact opposite sides of the same experience. Dana’s background is in qualitative research done for big companies. My background comes from the product design and development side. As a product designer and developer, you always want to get feedback on your product as much as possible. You try to get feedback, opinions, and do testing with real users as much as you can to understand the best ways to design and optimize your product. My experience with that was finding there are some good methods of testing products but there’s a lot of bad methods of testing products. In this fast paced innovation world, there’s really not fast ways to test products that also get you good, detailed feedback and data. There’s always kind of this trade off between speed and quality of data, number of respondents, etc. Highlight is a solution that allows you to get fast data that is high quality from a large number of respondents. It is really kind of the holy grail of product testing.
How do you think this might change the world?
Dana + Ethan: When Ethan and I were initially crafting our vision for the business, Ethan brought up the idea of ‘Imagine a world where…’ anchoring our thought process. Now, we imagine a world where buyers’ remorse doesn’t exist, people don’t throw products away after the first try and waste the materials and all of the human capital that went into making it. We imagine a world where a snack is never thrown out after a first bite, or a drink after a first sip. We’re raising the bar for what products deliver and helping brands clear it.
Keeping “Black Mirror” and the “Law of Unintended Consequences” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?
Dana + Ethan: One of the potential drawbacks of any product sampling and testing is that you give a small group of people the voice for many. There also could be various biases that are introduced as a result of the people that you’re sampling. People’s unconscious biases can affect the way that any test process works. When we were developing Highlight, we tried to think through a lot of the assumptions and the biases that are inherent in the more traditional market research processes. We built the platform to be really as inclusive as possible and the main thing that we optimize for is high quality feedback, helpful feedback, and useful feedback. In that vein, we designed our technology and services to be as inclusive as possible, fully accepting everyone and who they are regardless of ethnicity, gender orientation, income, etc. All we really want to know is, can this person provide useful and helpful feedback? Basically, we are continually trying to address this unconscious bias that’s present in research.
Here is the main question for our discussion. Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five things you need to know to successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact”? (Please share a story or an example, for each.)
Dana + Ethan:
- People come first. [Prioritizing our community]
Our vision and our goal is to reduce waste in the product innovation process. But ultimately, all of these products are designed for people. You have to put those people first, value the people that are giving feedback about these products, value those opinions, and treat them with the level of importance that they deserve. The people within our community that help provide feedback on the products are our most important asset and we really prioritize their needs in tandem with prioritizing our client’s needs. People are the key to developing the next great products and the future.
2. Democratize access. [Pro bono initiatives]
There’s so many massive product conglomerates that are the mainstays of the grocery store aisle but there’s also lots of smaller emerging brands that are coming out from the woodwork. We want to give those grassroots brands and products an opportunity to succeed as much as possible. This is a really important part of Highlight. We provide a lot of pro bono work where we waive our fees for a lot of smaller emerging brands when we believe in their product and their mission. We want to help get them the data that they need to succeed, data they wouldn’t necessarily get otherwise or be able to afford as a small brand. Giving access to those smaller companies is something that is hugely influential in their product development process and really helps push the whole space of innovation forward, contributing to our mission of making better products for all. We are allowing even the smallest brands to come in and get feedback with their product in order to improve it. A best case scenario is that that brand comes in and gets feedback and improves their product and then becomes the next big product that changes the world.
3. Build inclusive technology.
There are some common practices in market research that we questioned along the way, asking ourselves, does this have to be done this way? How do we make this more inclusive? We’re building a community and a consumer brand around giving feedback and we should be inclusive to people who want to give good feedback regardless of any other criteria. We really built the core of the application, the incentive model, and everything around quality feedback. We tried to make it as inclusive as possible for as many people to be a member.
4. Plan for scalability
Planning for scale is something that’s in our DNA as a company. It’s relatively easy to make an impact at a small scale of one or 10 but in order to make large societal shifts and impact, you have to be able to scale your approach up to 1000s, or millions. Every little bit of effort and every little bit of positive impact definitely helps the world. You want to make sure that you’re building your technology and your business to be able to scale to a place where it can make a relevant amount of impact.
5. Be kind to the planet. [Sustainable boxes]
In general our business model requires us to ship and send products to people’s homes. As much as possible, we’ve tried to limit our ecological impact in doing so. We bundle products together in one box as opposed to sending multiple boxes, we use recycled materials, and we use compostable materials instead of plastics when we do our packaging. We also, for example, have given pro bono insights to sustainable brands and brands that are planet focused. We know it is so important that those brands succeed for everyone’s future.
If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?
Dana: There’s no better feeling than realizing you’ve made a positive impact on a single person — imagine being able to do so at scale.
Ethan: Find the thing that makes you feel like you’re making an impact and hold on to it. For example, I think that there are a lot of presumptions right now about what impacts people should be making and those are all great and important causes. But, the most important thing is to ensure that you are going to be successful and to be able to commit to making an impact in the long term is to find the thing that is most important to you and resonates with you. Don’t forget about that, hold on to it as a north star. There are a lot of potential problems to be solved and when we get into a world where we’re comparing the quality or impact or importance of someone trying to make a change against the change that someone else is trying to make, we run into a slippery slope. In the end what’s most important is finding the right way for you to make a change.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. :-)
Dana: John Legend. Beyond being an entertainer, he’s a philanthropist, an entrepreneur, an investor, and a husband and father. He’s an insanely productive yet humble family man who’s surrounded himself with incredible people and success, leading a balanced life while maintaining professionalism, charisma, and optimism in his demeanor. I just want to pick his brain around how he’s managed to stay above water, and stay humble!
Ethan: Jamie Oliver. While an incredible world renowned chef, tv host, and restaurateur, his most impressive accomplishments are his social impact work trying to improve diet and food health literacy for millions of Britons and Americans, as well as his initiatives on climate change and youth homelessness. The fact that he has had so much success all while suffering from a very public disability is incredibly inspiring.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
You can find us at www.letshighlight.com or on our socials @letshighlight.
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.
